A Tale of Two Swords: Why "King Arthur" and "Cursed" Fail to Capture the Essence of a Mythos

Two recent screen retellings of the King Arthur story can't quite seem to convey the richness and power of this well-worn mythology.

I’ve long had a fascination with the legends of King Arthur. 

I suppose it started with my love of the Disney film The Sword in the Stone, but it really emerged in full force when I was in high school. When I was a freshman, we had to read T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, and it was one of those reading experiences that has stuck with me through the years. I loved the way that White managed to breathe new life into these old legends, creating a work that was at once heartbreaking and beautifully tragic. 

Inspired by my love of this book, I asked my English teacher for further recommendations, and she (generous soul that she was) gave me several: Mary Stewart’s Merlin Trilogy and its follow-up The Wicked Day (a retelling of Mordred’s story from his point of view); Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon (which I would re-read several times over the years, until the horrifying revelations of her abusive behavior toward her daughter came to light); and Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord Chronicles (to date the best historical reimagining of King Arthur that I’ve ever read). These books, with their ability to reimagine the classic stories while staying true to their origins, would become a set of books that I’d return to again and again.

Given that I’ve also always had a love of the moving image, I also sought out screen versions of the story, but here my luck was rather less spectacular. John Boorman’s Excalibur, of course, is utterly enchanting, with its bizarre and visceral imagery (not to mention the stellar performances of Nicol Williamson as Merlin and Helen Mirren as Morgana), and I don’t think that any flesh and blood human is capable of not laughing at Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Other than those two, however, I found myself more than a little disappointed with the offerings. The 1995 film First Knight is such a trundling mish-mash of elements of the story that, even as a child, I couldn’t really take it seriously. The 2000s weren’t much better. We did get the TNT miniseries adaptation of The Mists of Avalon, but despite some great performances by Anjelica Huston, Julianna Margulies, and Joan Allen, it falls far short of its source material. Likewise, other “historical” reimaginings, such as Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur (2004) and Doug Lefler’s The Last Legion (2007) lacked the sort of magic of which classics are made. In their effort to recapture something of the historicity of the Arthurian legend, they ended up being more tiresome than exciting; Gladiator clones without the animating spirit that made Ridley Scott’s epic such an enduring success. 

For a while, King Arthur seemed to recede from the zeitgeist, possibly due in part to the fact that neither King Arthur nor The Last Legion were particularly successful (the latter was, in fact, a box office bomb, with a dismal return on its substantial budget). Recently, however, there’s been a bit of a mini-resurgence of the legend. First, there was Starz’s short-lived series Camelot, which premiered in 2011 and, more recently, there have been two high-profile reimaginings of the King Arthur story, first Guy Ritchie’s 2017 film King Arthur: Legend of the Sword and then, in 2020, the Netflix series Cursed. 

Unfortunately, neither of these works have done especially well. King Arthur, though originally intended to be the first in an entire franchise surrounding the character, was such a disappointment that further installments were canceled. Cursed, though based on a graphic novel from the (in)famous Frank Miller and despite rather warm reviews, has yet to be renewed for a second season, even now that we’re approaching a year after its release. Given the fact that it takes quite a while to get a fantasy series through production, and given that its stars are probably already filling up their schedules, it seems increasingly unlikely that this particular Netflix outing will be continuing. 

What’s striking about these two retellings is how similar they are. Both, most notably, have a sword at their center. In King Arthur, it’s the title character’s ability to pull it from a block of stone (which turns out to be his father’s metamorphosed body) that reveals his dangerous presence to his paranoid uncle Vortigern. In Cursed, the Sword of Power (as it’s called) is an ancient blade that grants Nimue extraordinary powers but which seems to have an evil essence that threatens to corrupt her very soul. 

So far, this is all in keeping with some of the essential tenets of the King Arthur legend. If you know anything about the mythos surrounding the legendary man and his court, you know that swords are essential, whether it’s the blade that he pulls from the stone in order to prove his right to the throne or Excalibur, the sword given him by the Lady of the Lake (in some tellings these are the same sword). Likewise, in both versions we get some familiar names: Arthur (obviously), Nimue, Vortigern, Gawain, Lancelot, Merlin.   

Unfortunately, neither King Arthur nor Cursed seems to have a firm grasp of the rest of the mythology, and for that reason they both stumble and fail, though to different degrees and for different reasons. 

King Arthur, as I’ve noted elsewhere, works fairly well as a pretty standard fantasy adventure film. It’s at times more than a little ridiculous--I still can’t get over the demonic war elephants that appear at the beginning--but it’s fun and at times exciting. However, it doesn’t have a firm enough grasp of either its own mythology or that of the King Arthur legends upon which it is supposedly based to succeed on either set of terms. It throws too much at the viewer, with everything from slimy, tentacled creatures in the bowels of the castle to a mysterious group of sorcerers known as the Mages, without any sort of exposition to help us make sense of all of this. Instead, it assumes that its kinetic energy and frantic pacing will sweep us along and keep us from asking too many questions. That might work in a different kind of fantasy film, but here it ends up sabotaging whatever internal coherence the film might possess. 

The real problem with King Arthur, however, is that it can’t decide just what kind of King Arthur story it really wants to be. On the one hand, it has familiar settings like Londinium and Camelot, and on the other it seems to be in some alternate fantasy universe, one that has only the barest connection to the mythos that it’s decided to build on. 

Cursed, likewise, has so many narrative balls in the air that it’s sometimes hard to keep track of what’s happening. Characters and beings make appearances, only to disappear and not be heard of again: there are Leper Kings and Ice Kings and Red Paladins and a villainous pope with a masked corps of elite warriors called the Trinity Guard. It’s like 300 was transplanted into post-Roman Britain, with some elvish creatures called Fey thrown in for good measure. Meanwhile, Merlin floats around the corners of the narrative, Gustaf Skarsgård turning in a truly gonzo performance that threatens to steal the show. 

Thus, what sets out to be a story about how Nimue became the powerful Lady of the Lake ends up getting bogged down by its own mythological trappings. There are times, watching this show, where you can’t help but wonder how a show that’s supposed to be focused on Nimue can’t seem to decide whether or not she’s worth investing in as a character. This isn’t Katherine Langford’s fault, mind you, but instead the fault of a show that can’t quite seem to decide what it is: a King Arthur story or a standard fantasy coming-of-age drama. It can be one or the other, but not both, and in trying to be both it ultimately ends up failing on both counts. It doesn’t hold itself accountable to enough of the trappings of the Arthur mythos to really land as a King Arthur story, and it doesn’t have enough independence of that established tradition (or enough of a grasp on its own mythology) to work as a fantasy epic.

Both King Arthur: Legend of the Sword and Cursed reveal the perils inherent in trying to take on the King Arthur story in the present storytelling and cultural landscape. Firstly, it remains unclear whether this hideworn set of stories still has enough cultural cache to ever draw a wide audience. It just might be that Arthur, like so many other metanarratives and myths, just doesn’t have the ability to break through, particularly now that properties like the MCU (and, to a lesser extent, the DCEU) have become our shared mythology. Secondly, this film and TV series demonstrate the challenge in setting stories in a well-established tradition. The trick, which surprisingly few screen media texts have successfully pulled off, is in giving viewers something new while also demonstrating at least some adherence to the established limits of the mythology.

As of now, there are precious few forthcoming adaptations of the King Arthur story, though it appears that Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord Chronicles will appear, at some point, on the network Epix. When it does, we can but hope that it will avoid the pitfalls of the past and instead successfully capture, in a visual medium, what makes Cornwell’s trilogy so enduringly powerful.